


Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world

by whendocloudssleep



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, young!Rose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-20
Updated: 2013-01-20
Packaged: 2017-11-26 03:59:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/646321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whendocloudssleep/pseuds/whendocloudssleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s only thankful that his hearts don’t twist in pain when River whispers words and promises of forever into his ears, that word tarnished with memories of forgetfulness and pain, and lies he was stupid enough to believe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world

He was alone, is alone, will always be alone, and you would think that after so many years of that being the truth he would be used to it by now.

But he isn’t. Not really.

He’s only thankful that his hearts don’t twist in pain when River whispers words and promises of forever into his ears, that word tarnished with memories of forgetfulness and pain, and lies he was stupid enough to believe.

He finds that he stops listening when she starts on these tangents of what they are like in the future, the past. He has heard it all a thousand times before from her lips alone (not mentioning the times when Amy tries to force what happens to them, to River, from him as he drinks his morning cup of too sweet coffee, a habit that he picked up a long time ago, with a young blonde girl as they rent a flat in America as they wait out a solar storm that’s giving the TARDIS a load of trouble.)

He also does that more often than he used to. He can remember, last time, that he would interrupt people and talk over them and generally be a bit rude, but now he finds that he stops listening. He still hears, and keeps up enough so that the conversation doesn’t die, but he’s stopped feeling so entirely life-or-death about everything his companions say. He wonders if it’s not better to be rude in the more obvious way.

River whispers and fantasizes and Amy asks and talks and Rory just shrugs and says, “Sorry.”, and it all feels like it’s not enough. He wants to find a person to reignite that old spark in him, because the last thing that he needs is to get sad and lonely again. The last time that happened it didn’t end well for anyone involved.

He’s running and running and running like he always does but this time he’s also searching, because no matter how many times that Amy reassures him with her broken heart hidden just behind her smile, that she and Rory are okay, and that River is okay, and that they’re happy he won’t believe her until he stops seeing that tired little girl that he scooped out of her garden and tucked into bed.

As he runs and looks and meets people and sees people die and all the while he can’t help but feel as though things are getting worse and worse. If the Time Lord High Council were still around, he would be halfway out of the dark, and so very close to the end of his life, but now that they aren’t around he feels a bit lost, because he could hypothetically skip, run, and jump around the universe until he’s been everywhere and done anything. He knows that he won’t be able to end it himself, but maybe if he’s lucky he won’t have to, and while he doesn’t want to die now, not in this moment where he did nothing but fear for his life for two hundred years straight, he does hope that maybe someday there will be an end to all of this.

As he’s running, this time literally, he runs into a little girl, again literally, and all he can do is watch in a state of horror as she goes tumbling towards the pavement on which they’re standing. His thoughts stray for a moment about how he really needs to stop meeting people when they’re young because while he finds young people entirely more entertaining and interesting than anyone over the age of 16 and he will always listen when they speak, this is a pattern that he’s started and he would like to get off this train before it gets any further down the tracks. But his thoughts are pulled away from even that as the young girl turns her fall into a somersault that Willy Wonka would be proud of. She jumps up and smiles this great grand grin, and he finds it mirroring on his face.

“How did you do that?” He asks, squatting down so that he is just below her line of sight. The girl can’t be any older than six or seven, and he’s about to continue his questions about what she’s doing alone when he realizes that he is in a park, and there are a crowd of mothers chatting away on the far side of the jungle gym that’s sitting just southeast of the swing set. He’s not sure how he wound up here. Pay more attention next time, he says in his head, the Gallifreyan soothing him in way that hurts because it reminds him that he’s alone.

“I’m in gymnastics!” If it’s possible the grin on her tiny face grows, and he can feel happiness overshadowing sadness for this one small moment. He thinks that maybe this should also remind him of something, that maybe he’s getting forgetful in his old age, but that would mean that he would forget the bad things too, and those are still all locked away in his head.

“I’ve never been in gymnastics, but I was much better at not falling into the creek, and rolling down the hill than my closest friend.” He doesn’t follow that memory in his head because those thoughts, those memories of the Master still hurt because he had been so wrong for so long, and it cost him a friend. “D’you think that that counts?”

She leans her head to one side for a moment before tilting it the other way, and she looks as though it’s taking all that she has to decide on this matter. “Yes. That counts. And since I actually am in gymnastics, I am making you an homerrity member.”

“Honorary?” He questions, sensing the trouble that she’s having with the word.

“Yes, thank you.”

She puts a serious face on, and focuses every bit of her child sized attention on him, and a moment later it smacks him in the face because he recognizes that expression. That is the face of one Rose Tyler, and it takes his breath away. He hadn’t thought that he would ever see her again, had banned himself from doing this exact thing only for life and fate and destiny and miracles and a thousand other things that he doesn’t believe in to drop him here.

“What’s this?” She rushes forward to wrap her tiny hands around the sides of his favorite bow tie. Her hands rub against it for a moment, reveling in the feel of unfamiliar fabric, before she takes a step backwards so that they aren’t cross-eyed when they look at each other.

He reaches up without meaning to straightens it out of habit, the same way he does when anyone else brings attention to it. Making a mental note, to go have a conversation with Pavlov about his dogs, he answers her. “It’s a bow tie. What do you think?”

Her face scrunches up, making him wonder how he didn’t realize who she was sooner.

“I think-” She cuts off to look over to where Jackie Tyler is still talking, to where Mickey is chatting with a little girl who looks to be Rose’s age. “I think it’s cool. But don’t tell Shareen or Mickey or Mum, because I’m pretty sure they’d laugh at me. Do people ever laugh at you? I don’t like it when they do it to me.”

“People laugh at me all the time, but I don’t really care anymore. Most of the time I don’t even notice. They all think that the bow tie makes me look daft.”

She smiles at him again. “No! It’s cool. You’re cool.”

He feels his hearts lighten and the depression that he’s been spiraling down into fading away. It seems that Rose Tyler has always known what to say to him. He thinks that this will get him headed back towards being the person that Rose would be proud of.

“You should probably get back to your mum and friends now. Don’t want them to get worried about you.” That shouldn’t be his fault for quite some time now. He still hates that he couldn’t get the dates right just that once, that he had brought he back to a broken hearted mother and an suspected murderer boyfriend.

“Proba’ly.”

His hands are at his neck, moving his collar, and untying his most precious blue bow tie. “Here, have this.” He presses it into her tiny hands, and a memory flashes to the surface of her doing the same thing to him, the excuse that it matched her dress and that black ties were just so boring and that why did it matter where she got the tie just put it on already.

She grins like she did, like she will at Christmas when she gets an unexpected bicycle, and leans forward to kiss his cheek. “Thanks, Mist-“

“Doctor.”

“Doctor. I’ll keep it forever.” The twist in his chest is back, but it’s not strictly a bad hurt.

He grins back, and nods. “Yes, I’m sure you will.”

He stands up as she skips off, and as he’s about to walk away she turns around to yell, loud enough that he’ll hear but quiet enough not to draw them all kinds of attention. “Don’t forget that bow ties are cool.”

“I won’t if you won’t.” He says, coming to the conclusion that Rose Tyler will be the reason for at least some of the crazy things he does and says, until his hearts stop beating.


End file.
